Does HP + Palm = Facepalm? 236
ChiefMonkeyGrinder submitted a bit of commentary on yesterday's news that
Hewlett-Packard was buying Palm. From TFA:
"When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles ('clueless' was how I tweeted it). Why, I wondered, did it need to pay $1.2 billion for a dying platform when it could have used the increasingly popular Android for nothing? (OK, it probably picked up a few useful patents, as well.) I also thought that it didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones."
You may have heard of this thing (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that HP, like Apple, sees computing appliances as the death knell for general purpose computers. They want to make sure they're still around for awhile.
No... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be if facebook buys palm.
Seems to make sense to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
WebOS is a fantastic OS from a user perspective -- the card metaphor for multitasking is very intuitive and the whole design of the interface is easy and elegant and *fun*. It would be a perfect fit for that tablet thing HP is working on.
I have a Pre and despite a few issues with battery life and a wish for a larger screen I think it's a great phone. Most information about the phone is provided by members of the computer press who are too lazy and entranced by their iphones to bother giving the matter any serious thought.
scaling of webOS (Score:5, Insightful)
In some of the news reports on this, I saw repeated references to the fact that "webOS can scale" or something to that effect. I don't know too much about webOS vs. Android vs. Chrome, but my guess here is that HP is buying Palm for tablets and MIDs, not for smartphones. I doubt HP has much desire to go against the HTCs and Samsungs of the smartphone world in hardware, and they're not naturally a software company (a la Google and Microsoft with their respective mobile OSs).
More likely, I would bet, is that HP has doubts that Android will scale well to tablets (current offerings in the market notwithstanding), with their relatively higher computing power than phones, and their experience with the Slate is probably indicating that Windows 7, despite being a good desktop OS, is not scaling too well down to the netbook level and below. Thus, they might be leaving open the option of pushing a tablet/MID level of computers based on webOS to compete with the iPad on iPhone OS.
And, if that doesn't work, as others have said, Palm has both a valuable name and lots of talented employees that can become HP's mobile arm, thus allowing them to have their asses covered and prevent shareholder panic.
Re:You may have heard of this thing (Score:2, Insightful)
People around here seem to think that Android is the magical solution to all ills and ailments...
Re:scaling of webOS (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd submit that the current Android tablet offerings are precisely why HP would have doubts that Android won't scale well to tablets.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
For the day /. supports unicode :)
HP always been a weird company (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You may have heard of this thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Also WebOS has a better UI than Android and as good or arguably better than the iPhone.
Not to mention that HP will get the revinue from the Appstore. Really the Palm OS is very good what almost killed it was that stupid limited SDK they pushed. Javascript+HTML just doesn't cut it for every app. Add in the very restricted access you got to the hardware and you are limiting the software you can write.
I had the SDK and within a day I had given up on using it.
First thing I wanted to write was a simple flashlight app. I want to us the LED that they use for the flash but drive it at a lower intensity. I also thought that an more code sender with the flash might have been fun. You couldn't do it. Actually you could on a jail broken phone but not using the official SDK.
Okay fine. I then started to work on the programs I really wanted to write. I wanted to write a pod catcher and a music sync program. The way it would work is when the program detected that the Palm was plugged in and charging it would download your podcast and the music sync program would detect when your palm was plugged in and connected through wifi to you home computer. It would then contact a small sync server that I was going to write as a banshee plug in and syn your Palm. These where two different programs but a lot of code would overlap.
I started to dig into the docs but I couldn't find any way to get the chargeable state! THERE WASN'T ANY!
It was as if the people writing the SDK never wrote a program of a mobile device in their life.
The reason I would would only do the sync when chargeable is that was when you could be sure that you wouldn't drain the battery.
Re:No. Try it ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Because I want to do my software development from a tablet.
Idiot.
secret sauce (Score:4, Insightful)
Vanilla Android isn't cutting it, so everyone has to brew their own "secret sauce"
I don't think it is necessarily a negative to be able to provide customized experiences across carriers and devices. *shrugs*
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, at one time, /. did support unicode. Just that well, it's really hard to whitelist unicode codepoints
Nope, sorry, it's really easy to whitelist them and there are existing whitelists that you can easily use. It's slightly harder to blacklist the potentially malicious ones, but even that isn't too hard. Lazy Slashcode developers decided to revert the feature entirely instead of adding the half-a-dozen lines of code that would have made it useful.
They'll probably mess it up, but maybe not... :') (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually HP has a long history with Unix, both HP-UX and Digital's Unix product. They also have a long history of producing handhelds. This is a really smart move for them, if it works. Right now, they have this iPad-like thing, which is really cool, but only runs Windows, which, frankly, isn't going to be that great on it, and has been a failure in the same market for years. Now they have Palm OS, which is actually a really great product, despite its failure to capture the hearts and minds of enough customers. This means that they are in position to make a genuine run up against the iPad. Plus, they can throw out the x86 cpu in their tablet and replace it with an ARM CPU that will perform better and suck much less battery power.
So yeah, this is a really smart move, and I'm excited to see what they do with it. HP has a lot of management that's skilled at foot-shooting, but if they can get over their cultural tendency towards NIH and really invest in this product, it could be pretty cool.
Re:Lots of Patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Which may be the Bingo moment. Think about it. HP (and everybody else) uses Win XP for goddamn everything. Sitdown applications, pumps, little machines, handhelds. They can't do it forever and of course, the WIMP interface isn't the best one for smaller, handheld devices.
Now, imagine a more extensible OS than can be used on smaller "non computer" devices. Especially touch screens. An OS whose Human Interface Guidelines have been worked out and are at least as good as any on the market.
Might not be such a bad thing to pick up.
Re:HP is trying to compete with Acer (Score:1, Insightful)
Think about the number one smartphone (yes, the iPhone).
Isn't RIM the number one smart phone maker in the world?
Sprint is #3 carrier and probably was 3rd choice (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree but Vzw must have been working for a quite a while on getting the license for "Droid" from LucasFilm. Notice that the original Droid was a Motorola but the Droid Incredible is from HTC, so Droid is a Verizon brand. I'm pretty sure Palm wouldn't want their "splash" phone to have a brand they don't own and Vzw probably wanted their first Droid phone to be just "Droid" not "Droid Pre".
Next is AT&T. Yeah, they are going to risk the wrath of The Steve cutting off their money-truck. Notice that AT&T doesn't have much beyond Blackberries competing against the iPhone. The Android OS devices are nerfed and WinMo 6.5 is obviously end of life.
So that leaves Sprint. It's bigger than TMobile, seems to have more advertising dollars for devices, and has a history with Palm.
Soooo yeah. It was the best thing that Palm could pull off.